Serious question: a Google employee is not law enforcement. So if they are examining child pornography, in even only to identify it, aren’t they breaking the la

Serious question: a Google employee is not law enforcement. So if they are examining child pornography, in even only to identify it, aren’t they breaking the law? 18 U.S.C. § 2252 … c) Affirmative Defense.—It shall be an affirmative defense to a charge of violating paragraph (4) of subsection (a) that the defendant— (1) possessed less than three matters containing any visual depiction proscribed by that paragraph; and (2) promptly and in good faith, and without retaining or allowing any person, other than a law enforcement agency, to access any visual depiction or copy thereof— (A) took reasonable steps to destroy each such visual depiction; or (B) reported the matter to a law enforcement agency and afforded that agency access to each such visual depiction. So the Google employee would both have to “promptly” notify law enforcement AND not show it to any other person unless law enforcement and also have fewer than three pieces of content. And additionally, assigning hashes/etc — does that mean the file was preserved (otherwise what’s the hash representing? A photo they once found and then destroyed? How could law enforcement prove that the hash represented a prohibited image in order to establish probable cause?) “we say some random string of characters represents an image that we saw is child porn, so now you can issue a warrant.” What protections does the user have against a warrant being issued under false information? If the original image no longer exists, then how could the warrant be challenged? If the original image does exist — is Google storing it? And if they are storing it, aren’t they themselves breaking the law? In other words, do Google servers knowingly have child pornography on them? And does a private employee have immunity from prosecution if they don’t immediately notify law enforcement and also don’t show anyone else? I could see an instance where an employee shows his or her supervisor prior to calling law enforcement — which would be a violation of that law since the law explicitly says “any” person other than law enforcement. I am being somewhat tedious here, but I am genuinely interested in how Google can handle this without breaking the law themselves — more specifically the employee who, at the time of classifying the image, is in possession of illegal content. And does Google have some de facto exemption that wouldn’t apply to a smaller founder who had to contend with user created content and followed the same “assigning a hash” process as Google? What are the best (legal) practices around this, specifically around smaller companies that might have to contend with these issues?